THIS IS NOT ME!

Thank god it’s Friday people! It’s been a very long week for me and I’m sure for most of you it wasn’t an easy one either. Not complaining though, it feels good to keep myself occupied with things that I enjoy doing but the weekend brings another level of excitement when you’re in school. Today, besides my outfit, I want to share with you guys something very interesting that I learned yesterday in my visual culture class. I hope the title of this post awakened some curiosity in you and are wondering why the hell would I write “this is not me” when it’s me in the picture?! Similarly, my teacher showed us an image of a painting by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte which shows a pipe but under it in French it writes “This is not a pipe”. She then, asked us to make sense out of that image and after a lot of guesses one of my classmates shouts “it’s not a pipe, it’s a picture of a pipe” and that’s the answer she was looking for. In this case, that’s a picture of me but not me!

This statement opened a huge discussion in the classroom and it made me think deeper about media and representations through images. It is very essential to know that those who create these images have the power to manipulate the audience into thinking a certain way. This doesn’t necessarily imply negative manipulation but it is important for the audience to be aware of this fact and to become more critical when interacting with any type of media. The age of Internet is obviously a bloom for visual media and a very good point for analyzing this phenomenon could be Instagram. We follow people’s lives through pictures and we believe everything we see in their profile but is this the truth? Are we really showing our lives on Instagram or versions of how we wish our lives were? Some of us could agree, others could provide counter arguments and say that Instagram is a real aspect of reality but yet it’s not “the real thing”.

Personally, I believe that most of us try to portray our lives on social media as “perfect” but we are all far from it and there’s nothing wrong with that. Believing that what we see in pictures is reality could be considered a lack of critical thinking or just plain influence of the visual world and how it has somewhat “blinded” us. I don’t want to sound radical but a level of skepticism towards the media is crucial in order to keep our critical eye. I wanted to share this little lesson with you guys because I think that we shouldn’t judge one another according to what we present on the social media because we all have different struggles and of course we mostly focus in capturing only the positive moments. Instead, we should try to get to know people in person and be a part of their reality at least for a bit and believe me that once you do that, it will be easier to focus on our similarities rather than our differences. Cheers to #nojudgefridays and have a very nice weekend ☺!